“R Street continues to live the lie of ‘engag[ing] in policy research and outreach to promote free markets and limited, effective government.’ Pricing carbon dioxide, replete with global tariffs (‘border adjustments’) and tax differentials (‘equity adjustments’), coupled with a government-forced transformation to (not so) ‘clean’ political energies, has nothing to do with classical liberalism, energy freedom, free markets, or limited-and-effective government.”

It had to happen.

With its Left Progressive donors, R Street Institute was going to march down the statist road as one initiative got replaced with another.

Founded in 2012 with climate-alarmist/Left money, R Street tried to shed into new free-market skin by pitching a seemingly soft proposal to substitute new/better government intervention for worse/existing intervention. Specifically, replace existing climate regulation with carbon-dioxide (CO2) tax-and-dividend. That was during the Obama era, assumed to turn into the Hillary era.…

“Kevon Martis is a ‘senior fellow’ of a Washington-based think tank, E&E Legal, which has a well-known history of support for tobacco, oil, gas, and coal interests. He can hardly be considered an unbiased presenter on energy topics…. Hopefully, in coming months as this discussion evolves, a more balanced picture of the issue can come to light.”

– Peter Sinclair, Yale Climate Connections. “Wind Turbines Could Provide Many Local Advantages.” Midland Daily News, December 17, 2017.

“My recent wind energy zoning presentation at the Bullock Creek High School on the behalf of the Ingersoll Township Concerned Citizens spawned an ill-informed Op-Ed by Peter Sinclair in which he accuses me of misleading and distorted statements and further questions my objectivity and financial motivations…. While Sinclair wishes to paint the Ingersoll meeting as a deck stacked sharply against wind energy development, the truth is that wind interests routinely refuse to share the platform with me anywhere.”

“The wind industry says there are no independent studies proving the turbines cause health problems.”

– Scott McFetridge (Associated Press), “New Rebellion Against Wind Energy Stalls or Stops Projects, February 20, 2018.

In “New Rebellion Against Wind Energy Stalls or Stops Projects,” Scott McFetridge brought national attention to the growing, effective pushback against government-enabled, environmentally degrading 400-foot-high industrial wind turbines.

Some quotations from his article follow (red for emphasis):

• But when a developer sought to put up dozens more of the 400-foot towers in southern Minnesota, hundreds of people in the heart of wind country … fought back, going door-to-door to alert neighbors and circulating petitions to try to kill the project. They packed county board meetings, hired a lawyer and pleaded their case before state commissions.

Do not think that the wind power industry has market viability.…